Round peg in a square hole, rabid generalist.

(Via Instapaper) - the Most Popular Articles on Twitter

A couple weeks back, I noticed that when you ‘like’ an article in Instapaper, it will publish a link to it on your Twitter account with a predictable suffix, assuming of course that you have enabled Twitter integration. The most interesting part of this for me was the predictable suffix thing. Namely, it’s really easy to run a search on Twitter to specifically pull out all of the articles that people have liked “(via Instapaper)”. With that bit of knowledge, I was able to build a working prototype of what would become my new site, (via Instapaper).

In short, (via Instapaper) helps you find the most popular articles (or liked) from Instapaper, as seen on Twitter. The site has, given the amount of time I’ve spent on it, become a reasonable success. I’ve gotten mentioned by Marco Arment’s official Twitter account, received props from the creators of Longform and Give Me Something to Read, and am followed by a number of highly regarded journalists. All in all, not too shabby for a weekend project.